Author: Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

IE7 automatically? It’s no rumor

David DeJean speculates that Microsoft is going to use Automatic Updates to increase IE’s market share. Maybe, maybe not. A couple of scattershot comments:

If you use Windows, this really is an important update.

IE7 tomorrow? I doubt it…

I’m reading some speculation that Microsoft plans to release IE7 tomorrow (i.e., Tuesday, October 10) as a Critical Update along with some 11 security patches, all delivered via Automatic Updates.

For the record, I don’t think it will happen.

Microsoft has made it pretty clear in recent months that they throttle traffic on their update servers to make sure that the most important updates are delivered as quickly as possible. They’ve also suggested that the volume of traffic from those servers is sufficient to break the Internet. Given that tomorrow’s Patch Tuesday package is one of the larger ones in recent memory, why would they add a huge IE7 download to the package, potentially delaying the genuinely critical patches?

It’s possible that IE7 will be available for download this week, but If I had to guess, I would bet that the actual delivery date will be at least a week from tomorrow so that Microsoft can be certain that the majority of people signed up for Automatic Updates have received their monthly booster shots. Microsoft’s Scott Graff has already confirmed that the final IE release “will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download.”

Patch Tuesday next month is later than usual, on the 14th of the month. I think it’s a safe bet that the auto-download IE release will appear in the last week of October or the first week of November.

A few small design tweaks

Based on feedback from you, my dear readers, I tweaked the fonts to make more of a separation between headings and text. I’m not going to add a logo anytime soon, but I did change the banner at the top to “logoize” it a bit. Thanks for the many comments. I’m very happy with the way this has turned out!

No Dodgers, no Yankees

I haven’t exactly followed this year’s baseball season closely, but it brought a smile to my face to see that both the Dodgers and the Yankees were eliminated yesterday.

Sorry for all you LA and NY fans, but an essential part of being a baseball fan is knowing who to root against, and these two teams are at the top of my list.

UAC good. SPP not so good.

In the midst of a post about Microsoft’s new viral marketing campaign for Windows Vista (which I wrote about last night), Dwight Silverman tosses off this aside: 

Whether [the Demetri Martin campaign] will be enough to get consumers to pony up the bucks for a Vista upgrade, and once they have it, make them forget such irritants as the User Account Control and the Software Protection Program, remains to be seen.

I just want to go on the record here with my thoughts that these two features should not be mentioned in the same breath. UAC is without a doubt a feature that was designed to provide a benefit to Windows users. We can quibble about the way it works, but not about the goals behind it.

SPP, on the other hand, is the successor to Windows Genuine Advantage. Both initiatives have in common a reliance on Orwellian language that appears to be in the customer’s benefit but is actually a horrible inconvenience and potentially a nightmare. Despite Microsoft’s attempts to spin the new program, there’s no advantage for the Windows customer, and the only thing being protected is Microsoft’s revenue stream.

By definition, security measures like UAC are inconvenient. But SPP goes beyond being an irritant.

OK, rant over. Sorry to pick on a single offhand remark, Dwight.

What, no toaster?

When I saw this picture of the Fanatec heäd$h0t mouse/mousepad combo, I first thought it was a parody.

Fanatec heäd$h0t

I couldn’t figure out whether this description from Crunchgear was inspired satire or straight-up rave-up:

[T]his mouse is designed for gamers with OCD and is comprised of the mouse, the mousing surface (mousepad), and an arch to hold your mouse cable. The base itself is a two-port powered USB hub, which means it needs an AC adapter.

[,,,]

All in all the mousing action is really smooth thanks to the mouse + mousepad combination, and is a great deal for $100. If not for the fact that we already have a few Logitech gaming mice sitting around here, we’d pick up one of these in a heartbeat. But if you don’t like making your desk look like the Joel Schumacher Lego Batman Starter Set, this may be a bit garish for you.

And then I looked at the folks who run Crunchgear (be sure to scroll down). Ah. Now I understand.

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A missing IE7 feature

Browsers crash occasionally. That’s a fact of computing life. If you have a whole bunch of tabs open, it’s a pain to try to recover the group you were working with.

You can install Firefox extensions that can handle auto-reopening tabs after a crash, and this feature (called Session Restore) is going to be included as a standard option in Firefox 2.

IE7, alas, has no such feature. If you choose to close IE7, you can click a checkbox to reopen those tabs the next time you open IE. So why can’t the error-handling code that triggers this dialog box do the same thing?

If anyone from the IE7 team is reading this post, please put this request on the stack!

What digital media system do you use?

I’m researching a story about digital media and am interested in any stories you want to share about how you use digital media in the living room.

Do you have a TiVo? A Media Center, with or without extender or Xbox 360? A cable or satellite company DVR? Have you connected an iPod or other music player to your home stereo? Do you use a third-party program like Sage TV or BeyondTV?

If you don’t currently have any of this hardware, why not?